Most DevSecOps teams aim to deploy high-quality applications quickly without sacrificing security. But finding the right balance can be tricky. Since speed and security are equally important, how can organizations launch products into the market before their competitors while meeting a growing list of security and privacy requirements?

Why Speed Matters

In the world of application development, both speed and security are equally important. Fast releases mean DevSecOps teams can enjoy the following:

• Faster time to market: In a competitive and dynamic era, bringing products (or new features) into the market quicker than competitors is a huge advantage. It enables companies to capture a larger market share while increasing revenue, enhancing customer satisfaction, and ensuring adaptability to market changes.
• First-mover advantage: DevSecOps teams that focus on speed can enjoy a first-mover advantage and set the standards for the industry. Due to the lack of competition, companies can set higher prices, enjoy higher profit margins, and strengthen brand recognition.
• Competitive edge: The faster products are brought to the market, the less likely they are to face competition. This enables companies to have a competitive edge, respond to changes in customer preferences and market trends, and

What Makes Security Important

As hackers and bad actors embrace sophisticated tools and tactics to launch attacks, security becomes a critical priority for DevSecOps teams. Focusing on security from the beginning while developing software applications helps ensure:

• Stronger code: Incorporating security features into the application from the beginning leads to a stronger code, with fewer bugs and a lesser chance of an outage or downtime. A codebase that is secure by design reduces business risks while also minimizing maintenance and remediation costs.
• Better business reputation: A highly secure code base demonstrates the organization’s commitment to protecting customer data and maintaining privacy. By implementing robust security measures early in the SDLC, businesses can reduce the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks, avoiding financial loss, legal consequences, and significant damage to trust.
• Increased customer trust: DevSecOps teams that prioritize secure coding also enjoy higher customer confidence and trust. This fosters long-term loyalty, attracts new customers, and positions the business as a reliable and responsible organization.

Favoring One Over Another – The Challenges

When choosing speed over security or vice versa, DevSecOps teams often hit a roadblock.

• Solely focusing on speed can introduce security vulnerabilities. As the pressure to launch new features or updates increases, teams often reduce their testing efforts. This lack of sufficient testing can cause security bugs and issues to go unnoticed, putting customer data and business reputation at risk.
• Excessive focus on security can slow down development cycles. On the contrary, teams that focus on 100% bug elimination often experience delayed app deployment and delivery. This can cause customer frustration while also diluting competitive advantage and market share.

Striking the Right Balance with KPIs

Finding the right balance between speed and security in the application development lifecycle can yield several benefits. To do this, here are some KPIs and metrics that teams must constantly measure, monitor, and optimize:

• Deployment frequency: The deployment frequency metric measures the number of deployments teams can make within a specified period. A high deployment frequency indicates quick feature delivery to users, while a low deployment frequency indicates slower delivery.
• Availability: The availability metric showcases how well an application is performing. A high value means the app is up and running, while a low value indicates issues that need to be resolved for a seamless user experience.
• MTTD: MTTD or mean time to detect is the time it takes for teams to detect issues or bugs in the code base. A shorter MTTD means users face the consequences of IT disruptions for less time than with a longer MTTD.
• MTTR: Mean time to repair or MTTR is the period between a failed deployment and subsequent complete restoration. Short MTTR metrics indicate strong control over the deployment environment, while long MTTR figures suggest problems with issue resolution and service restoration.
• Change failure rate: The change failure rate metric represents the number or percentage of failed deployments due to specific changes made to the codebase. These can range from downtime, slow response, or bug introduction. A high change failure rate indicates underlying issues with change management, from a lack of team skills to poor management of existing deployment infrastructure.
• Customer satisfaction scores: CSAT scores greatly determine customer satisfaction with a product. A high CSAT score reflects customer experience and loyalty, helping increase retention and drive business growth.

The Way Forward

As DevSecOps teams look to drive higher ROI and balance software development speed with security, they must embrace certain best practices, such as:

• Automating testing: Automated testing can help maintain the balance between speed and security. AI-enabled testing tools can reduce manual effort by automatically reviewing and validating a software product and ensuring it meets predefined quality and security standards.
• Investing in modern application security tools and processes: Adopting modern application security tools like GitLab and SonarQube is a great way to detect security vulnerabilities in time, including illegal access, data leaks, and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Through go/no-go gates, these tools can prevent bad code from being deployed in production while empowering teams with capabilities to keep code quality and security under control.
• Shifting security left: A shift-left testing approach ensures security testing is integrated early in the SDLC. This helps teams identify and address defects early, reducing the time and costs required for fixing issues later in the process. This proactive approach also improves code quality, as developers can prevent minor bugs from transitioning into significant issues that impact user experience.
• Bridging departmental silos: Ensuring frequent communication and collaboration between different teams and departments can further help build a culture of shared responsibility and accountability. By bridging silos, organizations can empower different stakeholders to work together to strike the delicate balance between speed and security while overcoming roadblocks as they arise.

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